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The Bad Portent Drain type: A brief subterranean RCP run, emerging into a stream and quickly turning back into a tunnel leading to a very cool silo structure. Year: 1997, give or take. Region: Remote valley near residential Barrie. The same valley, in fact, as the Ice Box. Its open end is near the dump. Drain accessibility: The main subterranean run of the Bad Portent is locked up quite tight at one end, but the end close to the dump is wide open and strangely untagged. The silo section is barred but easy to squeeze into. Drain exitability: If you're running from the open end to the silo, you'll have to strongarm the last manhole off to escape into the stream between the tunnel run and the silo. Unless, that is, the big steel cage at that end is magically defanged in the near future. If your interest is the silo, the entrance is gated but simple to enter. The silo is as easy to get out of as it is to get into. Traversability: Frankly, the silo is far more worthy of exploration than the short, scary tunnel run from which the Bad Portent gets its name. There's a brief, slouching drainwalk over a medium watertable to the silo. The tunnel run proper goes past three or four chambers with a few small connections to parallel pipes and lots of intimidating things on the way. The pipe is about 5'6" and rather easily traversed. Interesting features: Interesting features in the Bad Portent include all the scary signs of flash-flooding like heavy pieces of rock and steel scattered throughout the drain, as well as the idiosyncratic complete lack of any flow of water. The silo is a feature in and of itself -- a very big and nifty place that seats about twelve. Hazards: We don't know for a fact the Bad Portent is particularly dangerous but the multiple ambiguous signs of such managed to give it its name. Beware! Incidentally, the Silo itself may be a drain we'd heard rumours of in the news, regarding a girl who managed to "fall twenty-five feet" and injure herself badly, apparently in a drain "near the dump". Needless to say ever since picking up on this story pinpointing the location of this twenty-five-foot fall has been a priority for us -- looks like we may have found it. Recommendation: The silo is a nifty feature that everyone should check out. The tunnel run itself is really only exceptional for scaring us so ridiculously the first time we went there. Note that the tunnel has signs of having flooded quite severely in the past and as such we can't recommend that anyone actually enter it. Scary stuff. Fear and Loathing in the Bad Portent The Bad Portent has a nifty photo gallery. The Bad Portent was the second drain we were shown to by Grebin one winter day, part of a little cache of discoveries he'd made a few nights before. It was a very cold, windy, nasty night by the time we had finished exploring the Icebox and made our way to the next drain Grebin had promised us he'd found nearby. The first thing we noticed about this one was a huge, dark cylinder in the distance. When we got close, we saw that it went down for some distance, and the barred "window" facing us wasn't going to be a reasonable method of entry. We walked around this silo and a few dozen feet ahead of it, where there was a tunnel entrance heading into its lower portion. We squeezed through the gates and walked spread-legged over the wide watertable. Before long we were in the Silo, and what a sight it was! It rose up three stories above us, with a ladder going up the side through a large metal balcony and up to the manhole, high above. On one wall was a large, mysterious red outlet pipe of some kind. It had a valve control higher up the Silo and its function was ambiguous to say the least. It was the oddity of that little device, along with the idiosyncratically huge size of this chamber, that first began to give us the superstitious tinglings that earned the Bad Portent its name. Nonetheless, the Silo itself offered nothing to fear and we spent some time climbing all over it. The walls were smattered liberally with graffiti, which added to the atmosphere of the place, and we found the metal balcony and second-story windowsill a nice place to sit for a while and get our bearings. Eventually, though, it was time to move on to the stretch of tunnel just a few feet downstream of the Silo. This run was caged and barred quite effectively at that end, but a judicious application of the fabled Urban Quarterstaff to a manhole up top offered quick access. We piled in and examined the place. The first thing we noticed was a high watermark -- the tunnel had no end of sand and silt in it, and there was debris all through the tunnel, from bottom to top. It looked like at some point in the past it had been totally filled, which made no sense since there was currently not even a trickle. Grebin and I walked to the first chamber in order to decide whether the drain was worth sealing ourselves in for and if, after doing so, we could escape downstream. Grebin had somehow got it in his head that this particular pipe ran for miles, and this sounded promising. In the first chamber we found some heavy steel grilles lodged in a pile of rocks that we couldn't quite explain, but it got us really thinking about what kind of flow this pipe had accommodated in the past. We started talking, of course, which was disastrous -- entertaining each other's notions of flash-floods and other such horrors led to us getting a bit nervous as we walked back to the entrance. We told our comrades we thought it was worth closing the manhole and going back, but they informed us that they thought they'd heard voices from above and Grebin refused to go up to close it, terrified that the voices were some kind of mythical highway patrol he had decided was guarding an imaginary roadblock on a road nearby. Yeah, I know. Finally one of us went up and pulled the lid over after checking for people nearby (there were none). We then proceeded downstream. We had no idea how long the tunnel went, what the air would be like or why, oh why, there was such an abundance of very heavy debris laid throughout the drain. We picked up our pace and were disappointed yet relieved to find that it ended after only about four chambers -- hardly the several-mile run Grebin had expected. It's hard to explain exactly why the Bad Portent got us all so damn nervous but there was something about the combination of noises heard, real and imaginary, the high watermark and other signs of previous flooding that just had us almost panicked. We kept encountering signs of imminent doom -- or just frightening oddness -- and the net effect led to the Bad Portent being the only reasonable name for the place. I suppose you had to be there. At any rate, while I suppose the tunnel run of the Bad Portent could be a fun distraction, it just scared us too damn much to really enjoy it now -- and what's with the signs of flooding, anyway? Go for the Silo, but I can't recommend doing the pipe solely for paranoid safety reasons. The watermark signs were too much to sanely ignore. Now go to the Bad Portent photo gallery before it's too late. -Flame0ut Contact: [email protected] .